Dave spends hours playing fruit ninja just to hide from reality

What hope for Britain’s future growth is there if even the Prime Minister sits on his iPad playing silly games?

It is bad enough that we have bred a generation of young people addicted to daft digital pursuits, from the detestably stupid Facebook FarmVille to the unspeakably tragic iPhone BogeyFlicker – seriously, there is a game which involves catapulting snot. A friend of mine plays it all the time in her office, as her business crumbles around her.

All this is bad enough. The nation that once ruled the waves has reduced its ambitions to computer generated games involving bodily fluids. Whatever, as the kids might say.

Work or play? Mr Cameron studies his iPad during a train journey

But the fact that our public school educated leader also plays these games of avoidance and reality-dodging should put chills up our spines.

According to insiders, he also likes karaoke, snooker, tennis against a machine that fires balls dubbed 'the Clegger', as well as three or four glasses of wine at Sunday lunch.

World debt crisis, what world debt crisis?

And before you say the PM is entitled to relax, I’m not objecting to that.

What I object to is how he relaxes. Churchill painted. Thatcher didn’t have any hobbies, she preferred working.

John Major loved cricket, motor racing and making model aeroplanes.

If he must have one, a prime minister’s hobby should set an example to the rest of us and hint at something productive, cultured and high-minded, an attitude that might drag us out of the soup of inactivity we are currently thrashing around in.

Mr Cameron’s hobbies hint at a state of mind that is worryingly consumed with hiding from reality. Any two-bit psychologist will tell you that. They also speak of an attitude that is so puerile, fatuous and ‘lowest common denominator’ that it is precisely the reason we are incapable of dragging ourselves out of this mess in the first place.